Friday, January 12, 2018

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 12 January 2018 - 18 January 2018

Hey, welcome back, Hollywood studios! Glad to see you releasing stuff and opening other things wider this weekend. It's letting Kerasotes Showplace Icon get up to full capacity, and also letting everybody else shuffle things around.

In the middle of all this, The Coolidge Corner Theatre gets to break out the big projector and film to show Phantom Thread, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson and allegedly star Daniel Day Lewis's final film, on a 70mm print. Day-Lewis plays a dressmaker who becomes obsessed and controlling with his muse and lover, and it also plays Kendall Square and Boston Common, with the Somerville Theatre expecting a 35mm print in the next week or two. Note the Coolidge's Monday afternoon shows will use a DCP instead of film, and Tuesday's 7pm show is an "Off the Couch" presentation with an introduction/discussion from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. They also start a month-long series celebrating Day-Lewis's career with a 35mm screening of his breakthrough film, My Beautiful Laundrette, on Tuesday evening.

The Coolidge also continues cold-weather midnights this week, with John Carpenter's frigid classic The Thing at midnight Friday while the weekly screening of The Shining plays midnight Saturday, both on 35mm. There are also two Sunday morning presentations: "Shine On!: Animated Shorts from the Children's Film Festival Seattle" in the big room downstairs and Goethe-Institut presentation of German indie drama Western in the still-respectably-sized room upstairs.

Among the wide releases, the most prestigious opening is, obviously, Paddington 2, with the entire delightful cast of the first returning in a plot that sees a master of disguise played by Hugh Grant framing the little Peruvian bear for a theft and getting him sent to jail with colorful inmates including Brendan Gleeson. I am dead serious about how this is likely the best wide release, by the way; it is as wonderful as the first and it was something of a relief to see the new one rescued from being part of any boycott against the Weinstein Company. It is at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux.

For those that can't quite bring themselves to a movie made with kids in mind, there's a couple more action-oriented presentations that, fair warning, likely got delayed to January for not being that great. The Commuter is the latest collaboration of star Liam Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, with Neeson playing an ordinary man (or is he?) blackmailed into some sort of train-bound murder plot. It's at the Somerville, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (in Imax only), Fenway, South Bay, the Seaport, Assembly Row, Revere, and the SuperLux. Proud Mary, on the other hand, features Taraji P. Henson in a blaxploitation-style flick about a hitwoman who finds a kid at one of her jobs and has to protect him from the employers who don't want any loose ends. It's at Fresh Pond, the Embassy, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay (including Dolby), Assembly Row, and Revere (including XPlus).

After opening at Kendall Square and Boston Common last week, The Post expands to the Somerville, West Newton, Fenway, South Bay, the Seaport (including Icon-X), Assembly Row, and Revere. In other reshufflings, theaters which booked The Last Jedi can now use their big screens for other things, so Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle gets the RPX screen at Fenway and the MX3D screen at Revere. Boston Common also brings back Marshall for matinees.

In one-offs, Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere have documentary The Opera House on Saturday and Wednesday. TCM's classic for the month is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, playing Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere on Sunday and Tuesday. There's a screening of Goodfellas at Revere on Sunday. Finally, there's the "Premiere Event" of Mary and the Witch's Flower, the first animated film from a pair of Ghibli vets, on Thursday, with the dubbed version at 7 and the subtitled at 8, at Boston Common (possibly dubbed only), Fenway, Assembly Row, and Revere (possibly subtitled only). That's probably more places than will open it on the 19th (if anybody does in the Boston area).

The Brattle Theatre spends most of the week on (Some of) The Best of 2017, the the weekend featuring 35mm prints of stuff that was mostly digital when it came out: Good Time on Friday (playing as a double feature with The Florida Project on DCP), Wonder Woman on Saturday, and Dunkirk on Sunday. It's DCPs the rest of the week, with a twin bill of The Beguiled & Lady MacBeth on Monday, Logan Noir on Wednesday, and single features of A Quiet Passion and The Villainess on Thursday. That gap on Tuesday is filled with Trash Night.

The Museum of Fine Arts continues The Boston Festival of Films from Iran with Tehran Taboo (Friday), When God Sleeps (Saturday), Negar (Saturday/Sunday), and 24 Frames (Sunday/Wednesday). There's also another Friday matinee of Canaletto and the Art of Venice and screenings of The Square on Friday and Wednesday. Come Thursday, they start the UCLA Festival of Preservation, with a 35mm print of The Murder of Fred Hamptom co-presented by Roxbury International Film Festival and a DCP of Desert Hearts.

Belmont World Film has their annual family film festival this weekend, split between three venues: Opening night film Master Spy and Sunday's "Animal Kingdom" events will be at The Regent Theatre; Saturday's "Water, Water, Everywhere" program at Studio Cinema Belmont; and Monday's "Heroes in Our Midst" screenings are at the Brattle Theatre.

The Harvard Film Archive comes back from winter break with a weekend of member screenings, so if you're a member, you probably know what those are already. There's also a regular screening on Monday, with a DCP restoration of All That Jazz serving as a holdover from 2017's Bob Fosse program.

I already caught Paddington 2, and recommend it. I'll almost be looking at the Good Time/Florida Project double feature, Phantom Thread, The Commuter, Proud Mary, Mary and the Witch's Flower, and some catch-up.